Friday 27 February 2009

Go Cisco! UC500s rock..

I bought one of these a while ago to do training etc on and ran into a few problems but it was pretty good.

One particularly annoying stumbling block was I use SIP trunks and when a call got transferred to voicemail or to an auto attendant the call would go silent and drop.

There was an Early Adopter (7.1) update recently and now it all works! I've alo been playing with several other things that are not listed as features or even mentioned as supported but seem to be working.

So you have one box that does telephony (SIP, analogue or ISDN), firewalling, IPSEC and SSL VPNs (with accelerator) which comes with 4 analog extensions.

In New Zealand something like 80% or our companies have less than 20 people so these are ideal. Now that SIP things work they're even better!

Sunday 22 February 2009

Mac RDP client to Windows 7

This may apply to other situations as well..

I was trying the Windows 7 beta and could not get the Mac to connect by RDP. I kept getting..

"You were disconnected from the Windows-based computer because of problems during the licensing protocol."

Easy fix.  Find a copy of RDP client for Mac 1.0 and try again.  You'll need to lower the security level in the remote access pane and maybe you'll need to remove the folder /User/Shared/Microsoft/RDC Crucial Server Information.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Absinthe and L&P!

A bit of a side track...

I have this bottle of Absinthe in the cupboard. It's been there a while. A friend said I had to try it so I did. Straight... almost spat it back out... Pretty scary stuff. Not surprising when it says 70% alcohol on the label.

Some months (or years) later, I thought it was time to try again. I got a small sieve and put sugar in it and poured the Absinthe through. It changes colour... cool. It even tastes better. OK it's not so bad..

The other night I thought that's a lot of work to go to. So I thought: could I just mix it with something? We have this softdrink (soda) here called Lemon and Paeroa (L&P) and pour this over Absinthe and it changes colour like doing the sugar ritual and it's even easier to drink.

So if you're in New Zealand or find some L&P, give it a go.. Add it to your list of things to do while visiting New Zealand :-)

Friday 6 February 2009

Scam Websites

I found a charge on my credit card a while back

UOL THE NAMESDATABASE 866 395 4982 US
12.00 U.S.DOLLARS

Weird. Stands out given I only do transactions in US dollars every two or three months.

After some googling, it seems I am not alone with these charges.

Seems a couple of years ago I signed up to a website and paid to get in touch with an old friend. I thought it was a one off charge to give me access for a year but they keep charging you each year. Best part is try to get in touch with them to get them to stop and email is really my only option and they don't reply to those if you query why you are being charged. Others report exactly the same problem.

So these tossers just quietly pull $12 a year from thousands and thousands of people. If you're in the States another charge in US$ would just blend in. They must make a killing...

They seem to be associated with classmates.com as well so think twice before giving any details to these sites.

Gentoo grub-probe not working

 I have a bunch of history commands I run when I d a new kernel etc and one stopped working. grub-mkconfig would fail with grub-probe for /....